"RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN MORTGAGE FINANCE": FEDERAL RESERVE BANK SAN FRANCISCO

FRBSF Economic Letter:

Recent Developments in Mortgage Finance

Researchpubs.sf@sf.frb.org

Mon 10/26/09

Recent Developments in Mortgage Finance

by John Krainer

As the U.S. housing market has moved from boom in the middle of the decade to bust over the past two years, the sources of mortgage funding have changed dramatically. The government-sponsored enterprises–Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae–now own or guarantee an overwhelming share of originations. At the same time, non-agency mortgage securitization and loans retained in lender portfolios have largely dried up.

FRBSF Economic Letter

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Index of recent Economic Letters

FRBSF Economic Letter:

Recent Developments in Mortgage Finance

Researchpubs.sf@sf.frb.org

Mon 10/26/09

Recent Developments in Mortgage Finance

FRBSF Economic Letter

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by John Krainer

Mon 10/26/09

BANK FOR INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS BIS REVIEW NO. 132: BERNANKE ON FINANCIAL REGULATION

BIS Review

Bank for International Settlements

BIS Review No 132 available

Press, Service (press@bis.org)

Publications, Service (Publications@bis.org)

Tue 10/27/09

Please find BIS Review No 132 attached as an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. Alternatively, you can access this BIS Review on the Bank for International Settlements’ website by clicking on http://www.bis.org/review/index.htm.

What’s included?

BIS Review No 132 (27 October 2009)

Ben S Bernanke: Financial regulation and supervision after the crisis – the role of the Federal Reserve

Mark Carney: Summary of Canada’s latest Monetary Policy Report

Sada Reddy: Leadership in a competitive and turbulent environment

Caleb M Fundanga: Consolidated supervision

Kiyohiko G Nishimura: Recent economic and financial developments and the conduct of monetary policy

e-mail press@bis.org.

BIS Review

Bank for International Settlements

BIS Review No 132 available

http://www.bis.org/review/index.htm

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Publications, Service (Publications@bis.org)

Tue 10/27/09

"THE SACROSANCT FETISH OF TODAY IS SCIENCE": JOSEPH CONRAD'S 1907 NOVEL "SECRET AGENT"

The Secret Agent, (1907)

By Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Chapter 2

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale is a novel by Joseph Conrad published in 1907. The story is set in London in 1886 and deals largely with the life of Mr. Verloc and his job as a spy.^{[1] The Secret Agent is also notable as it is one of Conrad’s later political novels, which move away from his typical tales of seafaring. The novel deals broadly with the notions of anarchism, espionage, and terrorism.[2] It portrays anarchist or revolutionary groups before many of the social uprisings of the twentieth century. However, it also deals with exploitation, particularly with regard to Verloc’s relationship with his brother-in-law Stevie. Because of its terrorist theme, The Secret Agent has been noted as “one of the three works of literature most cited in the American media” since September 11, 2001.[3]}

^References:

1. ^{Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, 1994, p. 5}
2. ^{Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale 2004, p. xiv}
3. ^{Carola M. Caplan, Conrad in the Twentieth Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, p. 155.}

^{What is the fetish of the hour that all the bourgeoisie recognise – eh, Mr Verloc?”}

^{Mr Verloc opened his hands and shrugged his shoulders slightly.}

^{“You are too lazy to think,” was Mr Vladimir’s comment upon that gesture.}

^{“Pay attention to what I say. The fetish of to-day is neither royalty nor religion. Therefore the palace and the church should be left alone. You understand what I mean, Mr Verloc?”}

^{“The sacrosanct fetish of to- day is science.”}

^{Chapter II (Page 2)}

^{The Secret Agent, (1907)}

^{By Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)}

^Contents

^Dedication

^Contents:

• ^{Author’s Note, 1920}

1. ^{Chapter 1}
2. ^{Chapter 2}
3. ^{Chapter 3}
4. ^{Chapter 4}
5. ^{Chapter 5}
6. ^{Chapter 6}
7. ^{Chapter 7}
8. ^{Chapter 8}
9. ^{Chapter 9}
10. ^{Chapter 10}
11. ^{Chapter 11}
12. ^{Chapter 12}
13. ^{Chapter 13}

^Dedication

^{TO H. G. WELLS}

^{The chronicler of Mr Lewisham’s love
the biographer of Kipps and the
historian of the ages to come
this simple tale of the nineteenth century
is affectionately offered}

^{Comment: The target selected for the planned anarchist bombing at the heart of the narrative is the Greenwich Observatory, as symbol of the fetish of the age, science.}

^{“The sacrosanct fetish of to- day is science.”}

BANK FOR INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS BIS REVIEW NO. 131: THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

BIS Review

Bank for International Settlements

BIS Review No 131 available

Press, Service (press@bis.org)

Publications, Service (Publications@bis.org)

Mon 10/26/09

Please find BIS Review No 131 attached as an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. Alternatively, you can access this BIS Review on the Bank for International Settlements’ website by clicking on http://www.bis.org/review/index.htm.

What’s included?

BIS Review No 131 (26 October 2009)

Svein Gjedrem: The financial crisis – the path ahead

Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Insurance and reinsurance in the aftermath of the global crisis

Tarisa Watanagase: Future regulatory challenges for emerging markets – a case for Thailand

Emsley D Tromp: Recent economic developments and their repercussions for small and medium-sized enterprises in Curaçao

Caleb M Fundanga: Zambia’s Financial Sector Development Plan

e-mail press@bis.org.

BIS Review

Bank for International Settlements

BIS Review No 131 available

http://www.bis.org/review/index.htm

Press, Service (press@bis.org)

Publications, Service (Publications@bis.org)

Mon 10/26/09

ENCOUNTERING TECHNOLOGY AS A MYSTERIOUS SPIRITUAL FORCE: HENRY ADAMS AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION 1900

ENCOUNTERING TECHNOLOGY AS A MYSTERIOUS SPIRITUAL

FORCE

The Education of Henry Adams

Chapter XXV

(The Dynamo and the Virgin)

The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900)

Paris Exposition of 1900

Summary

Henry is infatuated with the Paris Exposition of 1900, which opens on April 15 and runs through the month of November.

He has been studying Gothic architecture since 1895, foreshadowing his historical and philosophical meditation, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, privately printed in 1904. During the summer of 1900, he is also reading medieval philosophy. Even with temperatures in the nineties, Henry enjoys this summer in Paris. In July, he writes to Elizabeth Cameron that Thomas Aquinas serves as “liquid air for cooling” his heated blood. Always interested in contrasts and dichotomy, Henry begins to speculate about the medieval strength of Christianity and how it relates to the twentieth-century power generated when mechanical energy produces electricity; this theme will captivate him for the rest of his active intellectual life. In late 1900 or early 1901, he writes a long poem, “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres,” which includes a section titled “Prayer to the Dynamo.”

Commentary

Henry approaches both medieval Christianity and modern technology with skepticism, but comes to respect each in its own time. Through his studies of Gothic architecture, with its spires reaching toward the heavens, and medieval philosophy, with its emphasis on God’s will, Adams has gained an appreciation for the significance of the Church in the lives of medieval Christians. As a historian, he looks for relevant sequences that tell something about the story of mankind. With one exception, he is disillusioned: “Satisfied that the sequence of man led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial and the sequence of thought was chaos,” he turns to the sequence of force. By “force,” Adams means the power that motivates or attracts spiritual or intellectual lives. As discussed in Chapter XXXIII, this force works with something like a gravitational pull. In medieval times, he sees the Church and, symbolically, the Virgin, the mother of Christ, as providing that motivating, attracting force. As Thomas Aquinas wrote (in Two Precepts of Charity) in 1273, “Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.” He is to believe in the teachings of Christ; he is to desire service to God and salvation; he is to do as the Church prescribes.

For modern man, Adams asserts, technology, represented symbolically by the dynamo, has replaced the Church. Adams does not necessarily prefer this; as a historian, he simply attempts to describe what is happening. Modern man believes in technology; he desires what he thinks will be scientific progress; he must do what he can to advance with technology. The question of control is undecided by Adams because its answer lies in the future. At one point, decades before the first computer, he even predicts that the time may come when artificial intelligence is so advanced that man will serve machine.

Toward the end of 1900 or the beginning of 1901, Adams expresses the dichotomy in his poem “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres,” which includes the “Prayer to the Dynamo.” He sends the first copy to Elizabeth Cameron who has played a key role in Henry’s emotional life since his wife’s suicide. Their friendship needs mention. Nineteen years his junior, and still married to his good friend Senator James Donald Cameron, she has become his confidante. He often sends her private poems. Elizabeth clearly admires Henry’s intellect, maturity, and wisdom. Sometimes they tease, in letters, about rumors of a romance; but the relationship appears to have been platonic.

The “Prayer to the Virgin” recognizes the force of Christianity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as expressed in the belief in miracles attributed to Our Lady as well as belief in the Madonna’s intervention through prayer. The narrative voice is that of Western Man, who journeys back through time to seek guidance from the Virgin. He has lost his innocence along with his belief and finds himself in a materialistic world in which men worship the dynamo. Well into the poem, he offers an example of a modern prayer, “the last / Of the strange prayers Humanity has wailed.” This is the “Prayer to the Dynamo.” The narrator fears that mankind must master technology or be mastered by it: “Seize, then, the Atom! rack his joints! / Tear out of him his sacred spring! / Grind him to nothing!” At this point, Henry is looking back to medieval belief with some nostalgia. He is a little overwhelmed by the enormous scientific advances of the late nineteenth century, which include, for example, the first small, high-speed combustion engine; the automobile; the discovery of X-rays; and the isolation of radium by the Curies, all alluded to in this chapter of the Education. Soon, Henry will try to use a scientific approach to understand the sequence of history. His religious skepticism has turned to admiration for, if not belief in, medieval Christianity and the symbol of the Virgin. Next, he will turn to technology.

1. Quincy (1838–1848)
2. Boston (1848–1854)
3. Washington (1850–1854)
4. Harvard College (1854–1858)
5. Berlin (1858–1859)
6. Rome (1859–1860)
7. Treason (1860–1861)
8. Diplomacy (1861)
9. Foes or Friends (1862)
10. Political Morality (1862)
11. The Battle of the Rams (1863)
12. Eccentricity (1863)
13. The Perfection of Human Society (1864)
14. Dilettantism (1865–1866)
15. Darwinism (1867–1868)
16. The Press (1868)
17. President Grant (1869)
18. Free Fight (1869–1870)
19. Chaos (1870)
20. Failure (1871)
21. Twenty Years After (1892)
22. Chicago (1893)
23. Silence (1894–1898)
24. Indian Summer (1898–1899)
25. The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900)
26. Twilight (1901)
27. Teufelsdröckh (1901)
28. The Height of Knowledge (1902)
29. The Abyss of Ignorance (1902)
30. Vis Inertiae (1903)
31. The Grammar of Science (1903)
32. Vis Nova (1903–1904)
33. A Dynamic Theory of History (1904)
34. A Law of Acceleration (1904)
35. Nunc Age (1905)

Reviews

Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation’s history–and seemed alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.

It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics–he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. “The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial,” we are told, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother’s birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.

Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there’s also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement–and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world.

Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn’t do much for him. (“The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.”) Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he might have remained–bogged down in “the same rude colony … camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads”–had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father’s private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process–a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience.

He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.” There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: “He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism…” (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the “melancholy function” his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams‘s book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success.

Review
Autobiographical work by Henry Adams that was privately printed in 1906 and published in 1918. Considered to be one of the most distinguished examples of the genre, the Education combines autobiography, bildungsroman, and critical evaluation of an age.

Its chapter entitled “The Dynamo and the Virgin” contrasts the Virgin Mary, the unifying force acting on the European Middle Ages, with the dynamo, as representative of the forces of technology and industry acting upon civilization in the early 20th century.

Adams marks the destruction of the human values that supported the achievements of his forebears and fears a future age driven by corruption and greed.

His chapter “The Dynamo and the Virgin” takes us through the great Paris Exhibition of 1900. Adams was one of 40 million people who visited 80,000 exhibits there. And he was drawn back day after day, trying to understand it all.

Adams’s most important work of history had been his study of two medieval edifices — the abbey at Mont St Michael and Chartres Cathedral. They’d led Adams to see the remarkable social impact of medieval Christianity — with its focus on the Virgin Mary.

Now he gazed at a whole new technology that had sprung into being in just a few years’ time — dynamos, telephones, automobiles — invisible new forces of radiation and electric fields. He saw that the dynamo would shake Western civilization just as surely as the Virgin had changed it 800 years before.

His historical hindsight made him comfortable with the 12th century — but this was more than he could digest.

His guide through much of the Exhibition was the aeronautical pioneer Samuel Pierpoint Langley. Langley was a down-to-earth physicist, willing to explain things in functional terms. But Adams was too intelligent to take “this is how it works” for understanding.

“[I found myself] lying in the Gallery of Machines,” he tells us, ” — my historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”

Adams doesn’t mention two ideas that completed the intellectual devastation before his autobiography was published — quantum mechanics and relativity theory. But he knew, on a visceral level, that they were thundering down the road at him — that the exhibit represented a great unraveling of 19th-century understanding. In the end, he laments the blind spot of the 20th century — our denial of mystery. The Virgin was the mystery that drove the medieval technological revolution.

The Dynamo — and modern science — were ultimately being shaped by forces no less mysterious.

More:

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi131.htm

ITALO CALVINO'S "MR. PALOMAR" AS A KIND OF WORLD-MAKING

Mr. Palomar

Italo Calvino (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

Mr. Palomar is the title of William Weaver’s English translation of Italo Calvino’s novel Palomar (first published 1983; English translation 1985). In 27 short chapters, arranged in a 3 × 3 × 3 pattern, the title character makes philosophical observations about the world around him. Calvino shows us a man on a quest to quantify complex phenomena in a search for fundamental truths on the nature of being.
The first section is concerned chiefly with visual experience; the second with anthropological and cultural themes; the third with speculations about larger questions such as the cosmos, time, and infinity. This thematic triad is mirrored in the three subsections of each section, and the three chapters in each subsection.For example, chapter 1.2.3, “The infinite lawn” (”Il prato infinito”) has elements of all three themes, and shows the progress of the book in miniature. It encompasses very detailed observations of the various plants growing in Mr Palomar’s lawn, an investigation of the symbolism of the lawn as a marker of culture versus nature, the problem of categorizing weeds, the problem of the actual extent of the lawn, the problem of how we perceive elements and collections of those elements … These thoughts and others run seamlessly together, so by the end of the chapter we find Mr Palomar extending his mind far beyond his garden, and contemplating the nature of the universe itself.

‘Here, Calvino, probably Italy’s leading novelist before he died, focuses a probing eye on one man’s attempt to name the parts of his universe, almost as though Mr Palomar were trying to define and explain his own existence. Where the Palomar telescope points out into space, Mr Palomar points in: walking the beach, visiting the zoo, strolling in his garden. Each brief chapter reads like an exploded haiku, with Mr Palomar reading an universe into the proverbial grain of sand’

Mr Palomar (1983)

A collection of stories by Italo Calvino

Calvino focuses a probing eye on Mr Palomar’s attempt to name the parts of his universe; almost as though to define his own existence. Stars and planets, birds, a loaded food counter, all take on an extra reality, as though observed for the first time in wonder by a man previously blind.

Mr Palomar (1983)

A collection of stories by Italo Calvino

ITALO CALVINO'S WORLD-WATCHING

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985)

If on a winter’s night a traveler (Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore) is a novel published in 1979 by Italo Calvino. There is a 1981 translation by William Weaver.

This book is about a reader trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler. The first chapter and every odd-numbered chapter are in the second person, and tell the reader what he is doing in preparation for reading the next chapter. The even-numbered chapters are all single chapters from whichever book the reader is trying to read.

Plot summary

The book begins with a chapter on the art and nature of reading, and is subsequently divided into twenty-two passages. The odd-numbered passages and the final passage are narrated in the second person. That is, they concern events purportedly happening to the novel’s reader. (Some contain further discussions about whether the man narrated as “you” is the same as the “you” that is actually reading.) These chapters concern the reader’s adventures in reading Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Eventually the reader meets a woman, who is also addressed in her own chapter, separately, and also in the second person.

Alternating between second-person narrative chapters of this story are the remaining (even) passages, each of which is a first chapter in ten different novels, of widely varying style, genre, and subject-matter. All are broken off, for various reasons explained in the interspersed passages, most of them at some moment of plot climax.

After reading the first chapter (which is really the second chapter of the actual book), the reader finds the book is misprinted and contains only more copies of that same chapter. When he goes to return it he is given a replacement book, but this turns out to be another novel altogether. Just as he becomes engrossed in that, it too is broken off: the pages, which were uncut, turn out to have been largely blank.

This cycle repeats itself, where the reader reads the first chapter of a book, cannot find the other chapters in his copy of the book, so he goes out to find another copy. But the new copy he gets turns out to be another book altogether.

The second-person narrative passages develop into a fairly cohesive novel that puts its two protagonists on the track of an international book-fraud conspiracy, a mischievous translator, a reclusive novelist, a collapsing publishing house, and several repressive governments.

The chapters which are the first chapters of different books all push the narrative chapters along. Themes which are introduced in each of the first chapters will then exist in proceeding narrative chapters, such as after reading the first chapter of a detective novel, then the narrative story takes on a few common detective-style themes. There are also phrases and descriptions which will be eerily similar between the narrative and first-chapter chapters.

The ending exposes a hidden element to the entire book, where the actual first-chapter titles (which are the titles of the books that the reader is trying to read) make up a single coherent sentence, which would make a rather interesting start for a book.

The title If on a winter’s night a traveler is a good indicator of this novel which is reminiscent of Laurence Sterne‘s Tristram Shandy. The book commences on a hypothesis of novelistic elements (“If…”) on a when, a someone…would do what? According to this book, the entire novel, even its plot, is an open trajectory where even the author himself questions his motives of the writing process. This theme — a writer’s objectivity — is also explored in Calvino’s novel Mr. Palomar, which explores if absolute objectivity is possible, or even agreeable. Other themes include the subjectivity of meaning (associated with post-structuralism), the relationship between fiction and life, what makes an ideal reader and author, and authorial originality.

Italo Calvino (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979).

Lionised in Britain and America, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.^[1]

^{Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a book based on a series of lectures written by Italo Calvino for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, but never delivered as Calvino died before leaving Italy. The lectures were originally written in Italian and translated by Patrick Creagh. The lectures were to be given in the fall of 1985, and Memos was published in 1988. The memos are lectures on the values of literature which Calvino felt were important for the coming millennium. At the time of his death Calvino had finished all but the last lecture.}

^{The Memos}

^{The values which Calvino highlights are:}

1. ^Lightness
2. ^Quickness
3. ^Exactitude
4. ^Visibility
5. ^Multiplicity

^{All that is known of the sixth lecture is that it was to be on consistency.}

^{Italo Calvino (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985)}

CEMENT SAUDI ARABIA

AFG – Saudi Cement Dispatches

“Saudi Cement Dispatches” Report

Basheer M. Alrousan (basheer.alrousan@csr.com.sa)

Sat 10/24/09

Basheer Al-Rousan

Assistant Consultant

Economic & Equity Research

Aldukheil Financial Group (AFG)

P.O. Box 2462, Riyadh-11451

Saudi Arabia

Tel. No. 01-478-2525 Ext. 233

Fax No. 01-476-8021

Aldukheil Financial Group (AFG), Consulting Center for Finance & Investment (CCFI), Center for Statistical Research (CSR) and Computer & Systems & Engineering (CSE)

The Consulting Center Group (CCG) is one of the leading providers of management, financial, economic and IT consulting services and solutions. Founded in 1979 by Dr. Abdulaziz Aldukheil, CCG has emerged as the largest consulting house in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For over twenty nine years CCG has provided services to the most prestigious organizations in the Kingdom as well as numerous ministries and government agencies. Providing “International experience with local expertise”, the philosophy of CCG is based upon professionalism, impartiality, and integrity. CCG through its affiliates the Aldukheil Financial Group (AFG), Consulting Center for Finance & Investment (CCFI), Center for Statistical Research (CSR) and Computer & Systems & Engineering (CSE) has proven to be among the foremost centers of knowledge and an important player in the Kingdom’s economic development.

http://www.aldukheil.com.sa/e_default.htm

http://www.aldukheil.com.sa/english%5Cccfi%5Cafg.htm

AFG – Saudi Cement Dispatches

“Saudi Cement Dispatches” Report

Basheer M. Alrousan (basheer.alrousan@csr.com.sa)

Sat 10/24/09

ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH INDIA: CSE

Centre for Science and Environment India

CSE Fortnightly News Bulletin (October 22 2009)

The new lords of misrule – CSE News Bulletin [October 22, 2009]

on behalf of csewhatsnew@lists.csenews.org

Thu 10/22/09

An e-bulletin from Centre for Science and Environment, India, to our network of friends and professionals interested in environmental issues.

csewhatsnew@lists.csenews.org

Dear Friends,

A warm hello to you all from CSE!

Hope you had a pollution-free, green Diwali.

This week’s highlights:

* Down To Earth – Cover Story

Round the clock, round the corner -

Indian cities are trying to revamp their leakage-prone water supply systems. Municipalities are trying out new finance models and technologies. Can a 24/7 water supply regime serve the rich as well as the poor? And remain sustainable?

http://www.downtoearth.org.in/cover_nl.asp?mode=1

* Equity Watch: CSE Reactions on climate change developments

- The US Domestic Action is flawed
- The Australian proposal rears its ugly head, again!

http://www.cseindia.org/equitywatch.htm

EDITORIAL – Down To Earth, October 16-31, 2009

The New Lords of Misrule

By Sunita Narain

Last fortnight, we began discussing ‘authorities’, and asked: Is this variant of governance reform working? This time, let’s consider the Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSA). It was created because of a recommendation of the Joint Parliamentary Committee which investigated our report on pesticide content in soft drinks and the lack of standards to regulate contamination in food. The concern was the existing structure, based on a committee within the Union ministry of health and family welfare, was inadequate to the challenge of the modern food industry, which is taking over our kitchens.

We needed a regulator that erred on the side of public health, to ensure the food on our table met strict standards for toxins, additives and chemicals and enable nutrition, not commerce, to drive the food industry. Food science has changed, so has the business. In this scenario, regulation had to move away from adulteration-checking inspectors to knowledge-based decisions on the best standards for food.

But sadly, the FSSA is increasingly compromised. From the few steps it has taken—its track-record is abysmal—it seems to be not a consumer-friendly but an industry-friendly food regulator. A proof is the March 2009 draft regulation on food recall procedure, necessary for incidents like melamine in milk (China) or dioxin in beverages (Europe) or worms in chocolate (India). The draft regulation says it could maintain “confidentiality of commercially sensitive information and could delay public notification of food recall if it will cause panic among consumers”. This is for corporates, not public health.

It was no surprise, then, to learn—as we did through media reports—the committees of the FSSA which take ‘scientific’ decisions are stacked high with food industry representatives, officials from beverage and fast-food giants like Pepsico, Coca Cola and Nestle. It is evident corporate regulatory capture is possible, indeed easy, in this form of institutional management.

The reason’s not hard to find. First, FSSA, and other authorities, are created to be independent. But little is done to make them accountable to this objective. The ‘authority’, in nine cases out of ten, is headed by retired, out-of-commission bureaucrats, for these individuals have regulatory experience. But in the new role they are not bound by the government’s established administrative, reporting and personnel systems. Instead, by law, they report to a faceless Parliament. No specific parliamentary sub-committee exists to manage and oversee the work of a newly created authority. Regulatory capture becomes effortless for powerful interests in the petroleum, food or any sector. What happens, then, is decisions get murkier, undermining all credibility, making the ‘authority’ even less functional or effective. The experience of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board should teach us a lesson or two.

Second, an ‘authority’ is created without fixing the underlying problems of sectoral expertise and the need for integration with existing institutional capacity. In other words, no attention is paid to the serious details of institutional reform. In FSSA’s case, the expertise of standard-setting lies with the Bureau of Indian Standards, but that’s under a different ministry—Consumer Affairs. No real effort’s been made to re-engineer institutional capacity. No clear roles defined. Instead, one more agency’s joined the rigmarole of governance.

The situation is the same with environmental impact assessment (EIA) authorities, created in each state to scrutinize and sanction industrial projects. Till a few years ago, all projects came to the Centre for clearance, leading to delays and seemingly poor decision-making. It was believed decisions devolve to the state level, where environmental impacts are more evident. Assessment would be easier. But all this was done without thinking through the institutional design, and all it has ended up doing is to decentralize the ‘transaction cost’. EIA decisions are not being taken for the environment. Indeed, regulatory capacity is seriously missing in the area of environment.

My colleagues recently evaluated the working of state pollution control boards and found, to their horror, nobody’s made the institutions functional. They lack funds, personnel and capacity to ensure enforcement and compliance. In most cases, they are toothless bodies, made dysfunctional via neglect. The challenge should be to build internal capacity. But internal reform is difficult. So the government’s taken the easy way: bypass, and just create new institutions. For instance, the state EIA authorities have been set up as committees, headed by former bureaucrats or similarly experienced individuals, but without internal capacity to evaluate projects and no clarity on the interface with existing pollution regulators. These bodies meet, clear projects and go away. Somebody is ‘responsible’ for assessment and somebody else is ‘responsible’ for monitoring future impacts. So how can we have effective decision-making?

The current institutional ‘design’ is not for public purpose. It needs review, fast. Could we have institutions that can tackle future challenges?

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Related Reads:

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PM for uniform food processing policy
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For more news, go to: www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in

+ Inside Down To Earth:

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CSE Fortnightly News Bulletin (October 22 2009)

The new lords of misrule – CSE News Bulletin [October 22, 2009]

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Thu 10/22/09

CHURCHILL'S "SHOCK AND AWE" IN IRAQ IN THE 1920'S

Saad Eskander director of Baghdad‘s national library:

“The Kurds still blame the British very much for what happened to us. As you know, the first people to use chemical weapons against the Kurds were the RAF. They burned villages, used gas against the Kurds.”

But not only the Kurds, of course: Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State for War and Air, called for the systematic gassing and bombing of many peoples Britain sought to subjugate as it carved up a new colony on the dunes of Mesopotamia, the mountains of Kurdistan and elsewhere amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

“I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes,” said Churchill, “[to] spread a lively terror.”

More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/09/iraq.iraqandthearts

The Guardian, Monday 9 June 2008

See Also: “Human Smoke” Nicholson Baker book.

“I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes,” said Churchill, “[to] spread a lively terror.”